Shirts, stickers, and song-writing – doing the small things in women’s football culture.

Sam Southall

In a December 2024 interview with the BBC’s Michael Pearlman,  Wales manager Rhian Wilkinson said that the nation was ‘culturally behind’ when it comes to women’s football and, indeed, the place women’s sport occupies in Wales more broadly.  Wilkinson used the FAW’s Together Stronger motto as a call to action and asked supporters to "get rid of all this other story you’ve got in the back of your head” about there being a more than and a lesser which are gendered. The full interview is well worth a read and reinforces the belief that Rhian Wilkinson is the rabble-rouser Wales needs after Gemma Grainger’s more subdued time in the role. But the question remains – what can we do to fix our culture and bring about gender parity? 

I can’t pretend to have all the answers – great societal and cultural change needs to take place to remove hierarchical patterns of thought and behaviour around gender from Wales as a whole – but there are surely small things we can do as supporters of the Wales women’s team to bring about changes that have a larger ripple over time. 

Alighting the train in Wrexham for Wales’ Nations League game against Sweden and it doesn’t take long to bump into other supporters of the women’s team - it’s over seven hours until kickoff and we’re early - but it doesn’t really look like match-day. Advertising boards in the city centre make no mention of the evening’s game, there are no Wales flags draped outside pubs, and not a single bucket hat in sight. Sure, there’s a few Wales shirts around but no more than there are Wrexham or Premier League shirts. The city acts as though this is a normal Tuesday in the February half term. No red carpet will be rolled out for Sweden, the team ranked 5th in the world – the current men’s equivalent is Brazil. 

But a culture is growing slowly. Three hours before kickoff and Saith Seren becomes home to Wal Goch y Menywod’s pre-match meet up. For the first time today, there’s a real collection of Wales shirts – Carrie Jones, Lois Joel, Ffion Morgan and Jess Fishlock all have representation on the backs of shirts, amongst others. Fan-made stickers with players and their chants on them are being shared around, while some louder supporters are deep in conversation on which players need new songs (the consensus seems to be that everyone deserves a song, no matter how many minutes they play). Conversations will continue throughout the match and in The Turf post-game before a late night return to Saith Seren. It’s in these gatherings where a small, but growing, number of supporters are slowly laying the foundations for fan culture around the Wales women’s team. 

One of the most striking things about this culture-building is how normal it is. The shirts, stickers and song-writing exercises are practices that have been almost ever-present in football. Seldom does one go to a Wales men’s match without a Wales shirt, a collection of songs penned by an unnamed wordsmith in the Canton Stand in one’s head, and some stickers to cover the toilet stalls in (not that I would encourage such behaviour). But what makes things different around the women’s team is how new it all is and how a collection of supporters are taking it upon themselves to create the culture.

Supporters of the women’s team have featured player names on the backs of their shirts since before it was actually done by the women’s team itself – the FAW only starting printing player names on the women’s team’s shirts back in January 2019 – and that isn’t a surprise. Helen Hardy of Foudy’s, the leading women’s football merchandise store, has repeatedly highlighted the incredible demand for shirts with player-personalisation predating the Women’s World Cup in 2019, which has only grown with the rapid rise of the sport. This is an area of fan culture which can rapidly normalise the place of the women’s game within the wider Welsh football culture. Wearing a Bale shirt to a Wales women’s game is unremarkable, but wearing a Fishlock or a James shirt to a Wales men’s game inspires a different conversation. The proliferation of Women’s Super League and individual club printing has made it a relatively common occurrence to encounter a Williamson or Russo shirt at an Arsenal men’s game or an Alexia or Bonmati shirt at a Barça men’s game – the same can happen with Wales, with JD allowing custom shirt printing by default. Why not represent one of the women’s team or your next Wales shirt?

Fan culture runs much deeper than official shirts however. From bootlegs to fanzines, fan-made cultural artefacts are commonplace in men’s football. Bootleg fan tees are a growing trend in the women’s game – Foudy’s has collections for players like Ireland’s Katie McCabe and England’s Chloe Kelly, while eighteen86 have shirts for Sweden’s Stina Blackstenius and England’s Leah Williamson, amongst others. It may be premature to call for such an expansive project at this stage of the Welsh game’s growth. But one of the most prolific forms of cultural artefacts in football are stickers. From tournament sticker books to being plastered on lampposts, the football sticker is ubiquitous. A small number of supporters have brought it upon themselves to bring these to the Wales women’s team – designs with Fishlock, Ingle, James, Clark and Jones were shared in Saith Seren before the match, with more designs on the way for the Euros in the summer. Are stickers the hallmark for gender parity in footballing culture? Probably not, but if that Hajduk Split sticker on a Cardiff lamppost makes you think about a Croatian football holiday then maybe a Fishlock sticker will remind you to try out that women’s football thing one day.  

Ultimately, physical things can only do so much to bring in supporters and keep them involved, which is why it’s so important to build an inclusive community and an atmosphere at games that people remember and want to experience again. This is undoubtedly where the most work is needed in building fan culture around the Wales women’s team. Aside from chants of ‘Wales’ in Llanelli and ‘Cymru’ in Wrexham by the school groups of the respective areas, games can be relatively quiet affairs from the fans (aside from when they allow those annoying plastic horns in – god damn I hate those horns). This stands in stark contrast to men’s matches where the Canton Stand only quietens during tense (or very boring) moments. Chants ranging from the classic Viva Gareth Bale to the 20 minute rendition of Brooks Will Tear You Apart are an integral part of the game. The same can’t yet be said for women’s matches but there’s a growing repertoire of songs and a chorus that grows game by game. Fan favourites like Fishlock’s on fire (your defence is terrified) and All You Need Is Liv have recently been joined by chants about the tooth Gemma Evans lost in the playoff victory against Ireland and Cymru set to Vengaboys’ seminal work, To Brazil! But more voices are needed to make noise, more songs to make the difference when the team needs it – Swedish media credited the crowd’s “impressive chants” as helping us to a famous draw on Tuesday night, maybe your chant could be the difference maker at the Euros this summer. 

These are small things that those already engaged in Welsh football culture can do to  stop Wales being culturally behind and head towards state of gender parity that Wilkinson aims for. It’s not revolutionary work but it all makes a difference. To borrow from our nation’s patron saint, gwnewch y pethau bychain mewn pêl-droed and maybe we can leave a better legacy for Welsh culture.